Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (40 page)

Disengagement clearly will take a number of years and again is not possible without progress toward energy self-sufficiency. But by gradually breaking the energy shackle, Washington will reacquire the option of making policy changes aimed at redirecting—deflecting, if you will—the anger and violence of the al-Qaeda–led Islamist movement back against its primary enemy: the Muslim tyrannies that rule much of the Islamic world and Israel. Currently, the activities that Washington undertakes to facilitate the success of its current foreign policies in the Muslim world succeed only in digging a deeper hole for the United States. U.S. intelligence operations, for example, that help the Mubarak and al-Saud regimes survive and continue oppressing their domestic populations validate the claims of bin Laden and his ilk that Washington’s championship of democracy is rank hypocrisy and that America prefers that Muslims be ruled by tyrants. For the Islamists, the visible, often-televised impact of a U.S. policy that protects and prolongs the existence of Muslim dictatorships is an invaluable asset. This point is often very hard for Americans to see because U.S. policy does help to maintain a superficially stable and orderly, if brutally authoritarian, political environment in much of the Muslim world, and because U.S. leaders never deign to tell them how much danger Washington’s life-support program for Arab tyrannies has caused for U.S. security, and how much more pain for Americans is stored up for the future.

Thus, the reality is that the United States is becoming, and in some cases is now, identified by Muslims as the cosponsor of the tyrannical systems of government they live under. It is a common belief in many Muslim countries that U.S. financial, military, political, and diplomatic aid ensures that tyrannies remain in power. This belief in turn assists bin Laden in persuading Muslims that the key to overthrowing their rulers is to drive the United States from the region and thereby weaken the ruling regimes to the point where they can be destroyed by the mujahedin. Whether bin Laden is correct in this strategic assumption is an open question, but the fact is that his argument has won the agreement of millions of Muslims over the past decade. More important, it has won significant support among Sunni militants, as best exemplified by al-Zawahiri’s fundamental shift of focus from trying to destroy Mubarak’s regime to working to bankrupt Mubarak’s U.S. government financiers. And from a justifiably narrow U.S. national-security perspective, what price are Americans going to pay for their government’s unqualified support for Israel when the day arrives—and it surely will—when the Palestinians conclude that Israel cannot be driven from Palestine until its soft and indulgent U.S. patron is hurt badly at home? We fail to see this trend at our own peril, especially given the size of the Palestinian diaspora in the United States. If there is one hard-and-fast rule in U.S. national security, it should be that U.S. leaders must never adopt policies that tend to bring other peoples’ conflicts, especially religious wars, inside the United States. Washington’s current policies in the Muslim world are open invitations to others to bring their religious wars—Arab-vs.-Israeli and Sunni-vs.-Shia—to America.

I want to stress that the foregoing is not a purist’s argument against any U.S. support at any time for an authoritarian or tyrannical government. Because human beings are hard-wired for war and lesser conflicts, the United States will inevitably and repeatedly find itself in wartime situations where our interests will mandate such an association. We should have no moral qualms about working with any regime that can further U.S. security; these kinds of relationships, however, should be kept to the necessary minimum and the ties should be transitory, with disengagement becoming a priority once the wartime situation has ended. Most of our current relationships with Muslim tyrannies do not meet that criterion. The billions of dollars we annually pay to the Egyptian regime to pretend it does not hate Israel, for example, earn America nothing but a diplomatic mercenary in a peace process that will never come to fruition, and the hatred of common Egyptians who daily feel the wrathful whip of Mubarak’s U.S.-funded security services. I will leave it for the American people to decide whether they believe the Founders would have, for even a moment, endorsed the federal government taking money from its citizens’ pockets to pay a massive annual bribe to a Muslim dictatorship to pretend to be friends with the near-theocracy in Israel that American taxpayers also are lavishly funding.

So the first step toward American security after Iraq and the drive toward energy self-sufficiency is a thoroughgoing revision of U.S. policy in the Islamic world in the direction the Founders intended: noninterventionist, commerce-oriented, nonideological, focused on genuine life-and-death national interests, and undergirded by an inflexible bias toward neutrality in other peoples’ wars. Now, before the hyperventilating begins, let us hand out oxygen supplies to the any-change-in-U.S.-foreign-policyis-appeasement-or-surrender-to-the-terrorists crowd. And bring lots of oxygen because this crowd includes most of the U.S. governing elite. So pervasive is this no-change sentiment that at times you would swear that U.S. foreign policy was not drafted by fallible humans but rather arrived in the Rotunda, hand-etched by the Deity on stone tablets. It did not. The first thing most military and intelligence officers learn is to never, ever reinforce defeat; if a plan on execution lands you in a no-win situation, get out of the mess as cleanly as possible and go back to the drawing board. Our elite, however, invariably and perversely shows resolve only when it defends and reinforces policies that have America being defeated on every front. For example, the Muslim world’s anti-American hatred was raging in July 2006 because Washington and its G-8 partners were standing by and letting Israel gut Lebanon’s economy and infrastructure. Okay, what do we do? Right, publicly announce that the U.S. military is urgently sending large shipments of precision weaponry to assist Israel in making the gutting more destructive. Where is the sense in that? Enough. America is the greatest economic and military power the world has ever seen. What on earth do we have to be afraid of if we change foreign policies that are palpable failures and detrimental to U.S. security? Foreigners will think we are weak? Our allies will doubt our constancy? Domestic lobbies will retaliate in the next election? Churchill would never surrender? So what. We are the superpower, the policies are ours for the changing, and if other peoples and countries do not like the changes—tough. We are in business as a country to please and protect ourselves, and it is truly stupid, not altruistic, to stubbornly stick to status quo policies and bleed blood and money because our self-image might suffer if we admit to being wrong and thereby earn the criticism of others.

U.S. foreign policies are not addenda to the Ten Commandments; changing our policies is a sign of common sense, not weakness; and protecting America is infinitely more important than seeking to avoid driving Europeans and Arab royals into a snit. Foreign policy success can be measured only by the extent to which it preserves and expands freedom and liberty domestically. As Walter Lippman wrote, foreign policy is the “shield of the republic”; it is not the agent of planting the republic or clones thereof outside North America. The right path for America, therefore, is nonintervention and a studied aloofness from affairs outside the United States that have no bearing on our national interests. Nonintervention is not isolationism; the former is a policy, the latter is a slur used by America’s governing elite to quiet any voice that asks, for example, why are you dropping thousands of tons of bombs on Serbs who never attacked or even threatened the United States? To ask such a commonsense question is to be labeled by the elite and the media, right and left, as a Luddite isolationist who thinks America can hide behind its oceanic frontiers and have no truck with the outside world. Well, no, there is nothing explicit or implicit in the question “Why are you bombing the Serbs?” that suggests a desire to hermetically seal America. The question asks only what it asks: “Why are you intervening in the affairs of a people and a region who have done nothing to threaten or harm you and of whose politics, culture, and history you know next to nothing?” To respond by saying, “Be gone, you ignorant isolationist!” is not an answer, it is an arrogance that says, “We know so much more than you about the complexity of world affairs and—here it is again—the ballet of international politics and, in this case, the nuances of Balkan politics, that you must accept our analysis and actions as correct. Please go home, be quiet, and watch television.”

This modus operandi ought not to wash with Americans, but it does far too frequently, and our elites are today running a foreign policy in the Muslim world that has left the United States with no options in the ongoing war and that, if left as is, will ultimately destroy America. U.S. foreign policy neither protects Americans at home nor brings much benefit, let alone democracy to anyone abroad. Indeed, it is an absolute mystery as to why our elites believe that any American should give a tinker’s damn, much less a son or daughter, about whether any foreigner ever has a chance to vote in a democratic election. Mimicking President Woodrow Wilson, President George W. Bush has implanted more of this nonsense in the American political lexicon. “We are led, by events and common sense to one conclusion,” President Bush said in January 2005. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”
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Like Wilson’s half-baked assertion of an American security requirement to install a League of Nations, facilitate universal self-determination, and fight wars to end wars, Mr. Bush’s assertion is false and fatuous, and where applied as policy it can only lead to a grievous and unnecessary squandering of American lives and treasure.

Finally, it remains to say that the proper future use of the U.S. military against our Islamic enemies has been suggested repeatedly throughout this book. The force that we will have to employ will be far in excess of anything most Americans have seen in their lifetimes, as will the resulting casualties and physical damage. Writing in 2007, the peerless Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld explained that fighting Islamist insurgents can be done with a discriminate use of military power only if excellent intelligence is available about them. As this would not usually be the case, Dr. van Creveld went on to make the case for the indiscriminate and overwhelming force that America will have to employ in the future:

The single most important lesson to be drawn from America’s defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq is really an exercise in relearning a reality that has gradually become nearly opaque since 1945: American democracy and republicanism are unique and largely nonexportable. In saying that the American experience is unique, an idea often described and derided as “American exceptionalism,” one is merely stating what should be obvious to all. While the Founders certainly drew on the workings and experiences of earlier republican polities—Sparta, Athens, Carthage, Rome, the Italian city-states, etc.—they studied republics not only to see how they functioned but also, more important, to understand why each one inevitably failed.

The package the Founders ultimately put together for their republic in the U.S. Constitution took what they thought was best from the history of republicanism and reinforced it with a bracing dose of Machiavellianism and a central focus on the most important point of the American Enlightenment, that man is deeply flawed and not a perfectible creature. Thus, American constitutionalism to this day is infused with precepts drawn from the Bible, the history of other republics, the American Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, the hard-headed common sense of the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the successes and tragedies of the now four-hundred-year-old American national experiment. Composed of these varied influences, the uniqueness of American constitutionalism became more prominent because it was tucked safely away in North America and for centuries developed with minimal influence from the outside world, save those entering due to the never-changing American lust and talent for business and commerce—a sort of profit-seeking insularity, but certainly nothing remotely akin to isolationism.

To be sure, America has prospered because of the Founders’ design, and one must assume they would be pleased that others in the world are inspired to emulate the system they hoped would be imitated. But no set of men was ever more confident that they were creating a unique system than the Founders: they intended to produce a scheme of self-government applicable to Protestant, English-speaking America, not to all the world’s cultures and religions. The American model is what it is, the American model. There is no boast or sense of superiority in that claim, but rather an estimate of the very real limitations on the applicability of the American model outside America and especially outside what has historically been called Christendom. So clear are these limits that only the willfully blind or the politically reckless can miss them—both of which strike me as excellent descriptors for the contemporary American governing elite.

At base, the United States has been defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan because U.S. leaders forgot or ignored the history of their country. The Founders clearly saw the undoing of their republic if its government became involved in efforts to install the American model abroad, even if such an endeavor was launched in response to requests for help from foreign champions of liberty and democracy. The memorization of John Quincy Adams’s 1821 warning to Americans should be required as a condition of graduation from all American high schools and as a recitation from each presidential candidate preceding each presidential debate:

The results for America of “enlisting under banners other than her own” are now being played out in the mountains, deserts, and cities of Afghanistan and Iraq. In trying to install America’s system in devoutly Islamic lands, U.S. leaders display an arrogance derived from an odd combination of ignorance and naïveté. Ignorance, in not recognizing America’s uniqueness or accepting that our political experience is not reproducible in a society characterized by the powerful pervasiveness of the Islamic faith, a creed whose believers hear a recommendation that they adopt secular democracy as an urging that they turn their back on God. And naïveté, in not realizing that people like Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai and Iraq’s Ahmed Chalabi are quintessential representatives of what Adams called men of “individual avarice, envy, and ambition” who can be counted on to “assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.” As has so often been the case since 1945, Karzai and Chalabi used U.S. leaders who confidently assumed that their foreigner friends were in sync with American interests and ideals.

Adams and the Founders knew the power of religion and the uniqueness of what they were creating; they successfully accommodated the devout and pervasive Protestantism of their countrymen in a way that allowed religious dissent and freedom, and they warned against the dangers of allying the unique new nation with foreigners, even those who claimed to be championing the same ideas. Had Messrs. Bush, Powell, Cheney, and Rumsfeld and Ms. Rice spent a prewar weekend or two with Washington’s Farewell Address, Alexis de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America,
and
The Federalist Papers,
they would have quickly recognized the utter impossibility and irresponsibility of what they were about to undertake as a political project in Iraq and Afghanistan and across the entire Islamic world. Or they might have simply recalled the late George Kennan’s 1995 warning, based on Adams’s 1821 argument, “that it is very difficult for one country to help another by intervening directly in its domestic affairs or in its conflicts with neighbors. It is particularly difficult to do this without creating new and unwelcome embarrassments for the country endeavoring to help. The best way for a larger country to help smaller ones is surely by the power of example.”
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The George W. Bush administration’s failure to learn and apply the Founders’ wisdom is different only in degree, not in kind, from that of its two predecessors. Together the three administrations have left a legacy of disaster abroad and insecurity at home. Their behavior, ahistorical thinking, and lack of common sense have, alas, put the American experiment at risk. In 1936 Winston Churchill posed a question about whether the political and cultural inheritance of Britons was being protected; the same question can serve as an appropriate and hopefully haunting query for U.S. leaders who seem bent on squandering the heritage of Americans. “We must recognize,” Churchill said in September 1936, in words echoing those of Samuel Adams in 1771,

Are we? We clearly are not.